... Chemical beneficiation methods make use of leaching, usually under acidic or reducing conditions (Veglio & Toro, 1994;de Mesquita et al., 1996;Ambikadevi & Lalithambika, 2000;Atkinson & Fleming, 2001). Therefore, numerous leaching agents such as organic acids (de Mesquita et al., 1996;Veglio et al., 1996;Ambikadevi & Lalithambika, 2000;Tuncuk et al., 2010;He et al., 2011), sulfuric acid (H 2 SO 4 ; Veglio, 1997;Tuncuk et al., 2013), sodium dithionite (Na 2 S 2 O 4 ; Mehra & Jackson, 1958;Thurlow, 2001;Gougazeh, 2018), sodium thiosulfate (Na 2 S 2 O 3 ; Olvera-Venegas et al., 2017), thiourea (H 2 NCSNH 2 ), dioxide thiourea ((NH 2 ) 2 CSO 2 ; Veglio, 1997;Xia et al., 2012;Lu et al., 2017aLu et al., , 2017b, chlorine water (Carpmael, 1928;González & Ruiz, 2006) and EDTA (Borgaard, 1979), as well as thermochemical techniques (Khalifa et al., 2013(Khalifa et al., , 2019, have been used to remove iron and other impurities from quartz and clay minerals. The bioleaching technique (Kostka et al., 1999;Lee et al., 2002;Cameselle et al., 2003;Hosseini et al., 2007;Guo et al., 2010;He et al., 2011;Zegeye et al., 2013) is also of great interest for iron removal from clay minerals. ...